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Does Test-Driven Development Really Improve Software Design Quality?
March/April 2008 (vol. 25 no. 2)
pp. 77-84
ASCII Text
x 
 
David Janzen, Hossein Saiedian, "Does Test-Driven Development Really Improve Software Design Quality?," IEEE Software, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 77-84, March/April, 2008.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/MS.2008.34,
author = {David Janzen and Hossein Saiedian},
title = {Does Test-Driven Development Really Improve Software Design Quality?},
journal ={IEEE Software},
volume = {25},
number = {2},
issn = {0740-7459},
year = {2008},
pages = {77-84},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2008.34},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - MGZN
JO - IEEE Software
TI - Does Test-Driven Development Really Improve Software Design Quality?
IS - 2
SN - 0740-7459
SP77
EP84
EPD - 77-84
A1 - David Janzen,
A1 - Hossein Saiedian,
PY - 2008
KW - test design
KW - test-driven development
KW - TDD
KW - software design
KW - software architecture
KW - quality analysis
KW - quality metrics
VL - 25
JA - IEEE Software
ER -
 
David Janzen, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Hossein Saiedian, University of Kansas
Test-driven development (TDD) is first and foremost a design practice. The question is, "How good are the resulting designs?" Advocates claim that TDD produces code that is simpler, more cohesive, and less coupled than code developed in a more traditional test-last way. Sounds good, but is it true? We collected evidence to substantiate or question the claims regarding TDD's influence on software. We focused on internal software quality?that is, design and code characteristics such as code complexity, size, coupling, and cohesion. We conducted three quasicontrolled experiments and one case study in a Fortune 500 company and another two quasicontrolled experiments with university students in undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses. We evaluated 24 student and professional programmers working on 21 software projects ranging in size from a few hundred to over 30,000 lines of code. The results indicate that TDD programmers tend to write software modules that are smaller, less complex, and more highly tested than modules produced by their test-last counterparts. However, the results didn't support claims for lower coupling and increased cohesion with TDD.

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Index Terms:
test design, test-driven development, TDD, software design, software architecture, quality analysis, quality metrics
Citation:
David Janzen, Hossein Saiedian, "Does Test-Driven Development Really Improve Software Design Quality?," IEEE Software, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 77-84, March-April 2008, doi:10.1109/MS.2008.34
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